I mentioned this in the Naglo thread, but I'll mention it here as well. I played around with a similar idea a couple months ago and made a proof of concept (
download link here). The essential idea of it, was that it took place in the future where the Singularity has happened and everybody lives in this online world run by this world government/mega corporation. However, for people dissatisfied with this, certain renegade individuals have established a second digital reality based off of old internet protocols. It's a sort of digital ghetto. Something like what
Kowloon Walled City was to Hong Kong. A place of utter freedom, but also with all the pros and minuses that entails. I thought this idea would work well for a forum project since it's quite open ended and would allow for the story to go many directions. It would also allow anyone that wants to participate to create their own characters and have them incorporated into the story.
Anyway, I abandoned the effort chiefly because that was only ever a side project and the main thing I have been working on for the past year has been demanding way more of my time recently.
Regardless, some advice I would like to give since I've seen various forum/internet community projects attempted over the years and only one or two succeed. If you want this to succeed, there needs to be professional-level leadership organizing things at the top. Naglo's approach of telling people to just do stuff might lead do some concept art being created at the very beginning from hype, but people will stop contributing if they don't get a sense that the leader on top is organizing things carefully. People will only ever take things as seriously as their leader demonstrates capability in (this actually applies to life in general). Again, that's why I abandoned the above project. Because I wasn't willing to make it a priority.
I don't say any of this to be discouraging btw. To the contrary I would love to see a project like this succeed. But it'll only succeed if people take it seriously. And forum members will only take it seriously if it's evident that the person leading the project is not just serious, but demonstrating a commitment to the project.
As for myself, if you want to build off of and modify what I have already done feel free to use it. Even if just for a base of concept. Otherwise, I'm interested in contributing some writing and directorial advice on how to make effective use of visuals, audio, and text in a visual novel.
he's a big guy 4 u
